DEV Community: Boris Jamot ✊ /

Consistent Developer Journey with Dracula 🧛‍♂️

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 17:50:17 +0000

Recently, I've customized all my favorite apps with Dracula theme. As the Dracula team does a great job, I quickly found themes for the following apps:

VSCode
Intellij
Vim

There are also many Dracula themes for Firefox. I choose Klorax' one.

Then, I wanted to go further and have the same journey in my terminal emulator. Fortunately, the deepin-terminal comes with a lot of bundled themes, including Dracula.

But as a Tmux user, I was a bit frustrated as the status line I used had nothing to do with Dracula. And there was no Dracula theme for Tmux. So I created one:

mamyn0va / tmux-dracula

🔥 Awesome .tmux.conf configuration file with Dracula theme 🧛‍♂️ and task support.

tmux-dracula

Self-contained, pretty and versatile .tmux.conf configuration file with Dracula theme and task support.

Installation

Requirements:

tmux >= 2.1 running inside Linux, Mac, OpenBSD, Cygwin or WSL (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows)
taskwarrior
outside of tmux, $TERM must be set to xterm-256color

To install, run the following from your terminal: (you may want to backup your existing ~/.tmux.conf first)

$ cd
$ git clone git@github.com:mamyn0va/tmux-dracula.git .tmux
$ ln -s -f .tmux/.tmux.conf
$ cp .tmux/.tmux.conf.local
$ git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm

Then reload your tmux conf:

$ tmux source ~/.tmux.conf

Then install the required plugins by pressing prefix + I (capital i, as in Install) to fetch the plugins using tpm.

Finally proceed to customize your ~/.tmux.conf.local copy.

If you're a Vim user, setting the $EDITOR environment variable to vim will enable and further customize the vi-style key bindings (see tmux manual).

If you're new to tmux, I recommend…

View on GitHub

In fact, I just forked the awesome Tmux conf from gpakosz and I changed the colors according to the color palette of Dracula.

Et voilà!

The shell in the screenshot is fish with SpaceFish prompt.

If you're looking to have the same look and feel when listing your folders (ls, ll or lla), I created a Dracula theme for colorls which is a drop-in replacement for ls unix command.

And you're done!

It's Been One Year ! 🎉 🎂 🏆

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 21:02:02 +0000

Hi all!

It's been one year since I joined the dev.to community.

During this year:

✍️ I wrote 21 posts
👍 I followed 60 people
😍 I got 1877 posts reactions
🤩 I got 4367 followers
👁 I got 56625 posts views
🏆 I got 5 different badges

But most of all, I found a very welcoming community.

So, thanks to all of you for being so open-minded. I'm sure @ben and the staff (@thepracticaldev ) will do everything to keep this good spirit.

🔥 🤩 My Fucking Awesome Dev Setup 🤩 🔥

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 09:28:34 +0000

This article was inspired by this other post I saw recently:

My beautiful Linux development environment

Deepu K Sasidharan ・ Jun 16 '19

#linux #fedora #development #gnome

It always amazes me that such weekly articles always get so popular. So I wrote another one.

🔍 Quick Overview

OS: Manjaro
Windows Management: Deepin Desktop Environment
IDE: Intellij
Editor: Neovim
Terminal: Guake
Shell: Fish
Tools:
- Terminal Multiplexer: Tmux
- Universal Launcher: Albert
- File Watcher: Modd

🐧 Manjaro

Manjaro is a Linux distribution based on ArchLinux. It's a rolling release, which means that you get updates for your apps very quickly. It can be great for developers, because we don't want to wait to have security or featured updates, but it's also dangerous because such distro can break more easily. So install it at your own risk! That being said, I must tell you that I'm not a great expert of Linux, and I never got stuck with my Manjaro.

Pacman is the default CLI package manager. It's very basic and rudimentary. Now I use yay which is more user-friendly. If you prefer graphical apps, have a look at pamac.

🗔 Deepin Desktop Environment

When it comes to choosing the right desktop environment for a Linux distro, we're often forced to select the less horrible one. You may think I'm a bit excessive, but many well-known window managers (Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, xfce, ...) are, in their default configuration, just awful.

After having tried many of them (xfce, Gnome, Budgie, i3wm, awesomewm), I finally opted for Deepin Desktop Environment. It works like a charm out-of-the-box and as I'm a lazy developer, it was just perfect for me. The look and feel is clearly inspired by macOS. The dock is very similar, the settings panel also. It's both pure and elegant. Its main advantage is also its main drawback: it's quite not configurable at all. So either it fits your need, either you choose another one.

Deepin Apps Browser

Deepin Settings Panel

Deepin Quick Launcher

Deepin File Manager

Albert

Albert is an Alfred-like launcher that brings you many features in a simple search bar. Just invoke it by some user-defined hotkey (I use <ctrl>+SPC) and start typing!

You can trigger web searches, in-line translations, calculations, shell commands, ... and it's widely extendable with plugins.

👨🏼‍💻 Intellij Ultimate + Go plugin

As a Go developer, I am very pragmatic. Thus, I chose the best tool for my needs, which is Intellij with Go plugin. It has all I need in a modern IDE: completion, browsing, debugging, refactoring, syntax highlighting, ... But it's not a definitive choice. I already tried, with more or less success, several other IDE: VSCode, Atom, Vim. While the first two didn't fully work out-of-the-box, the last (Vim) was pretty impressive (with SpaceVim). But as I wasn't very comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, I finally dropped it for Intellij. I may reconsider this very soon...

👽 Guake + Tmux + Fish + Vim + Modd

Under Linux, you need a shell to run commands. But this shell can't run alone. It needs a terminal emulator. So imagine you want to edit a file, you'll need to run a terminal emulator (say xterm), that will launch your default shell (say bash), and then you'll be able to run vim. It's like russian dolls (xterm > bash > vim). And if you want to split your terminal in several panes, you'll need another layer between your terminal emulator and your shell: tmux (xterm > tmux > bash > vim).

🧙‍♂️ It's the magic of Unix interoperability: each app does its job well, and only its job.

💻 Guake

Guake is a drop-down terminal inspired by the terminal used in the game Quake. I customized it to remove scrollbars, tab bar and title bar so that it just looks like a nude terminal. By default it's hidden and it appears when I press <F12>. I go full screen with <F11>.

My conf:

font: Monaco for Powerline Regular, size 10
transparency: 10%
default interpreter: tmux
theme: molokai

🤖 Tmux

Tmux is a powerful terminal multiplexer.

screenshot by @gpakozs

I posted an article about my custom setup earlier this year. Have a look on it if you're interested:

Building a Custom IDE with Tmux

Boris Jamot ✊ / ・ Feb 5 '19

#cli #showdev #craftsmanship #githunt

🐟 Fish shell

Fish is a user-oriented shell with powerful features like auto-suggestion, completion, command colors, ...

As the shell is the place I spend most time in, I need to have the most useful and clear information in it. That's why I use SpaceFish prompt. It empowers you with git information, version of your favorite language, Docker's version, Vi mode, last command status & duration, ...

I also use oh-my-fish framework to extend the shell with plugins (I recommend grc, g2 fzf, pj & z).

📝 Neovim

Neovim is a refactor of Vim that brings a better plugins system and that is easier to contribute to.

neovim / neovim

Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

Documentation | Chat

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to:

Simplify maintenance and encourage contributions
Split the work between multiple developers
Enable advanced UIs without modifications to the core
Maximize extensibility

See the Introduction wiki page and Roadmap for more information.

Features

Modern GUIs
API access from any language including C/C++, C#, Clojure, D, Elixir, Go, Haskell, Java/Kotlin JavaScript/Node.js, Julia, Lisp, Lua, Perl, Python, Racket, Ruby, Rust
Embedded, scriptable terminal emulator
Asynchronous job control
Shared data (shada) among multiple editor instances
XDG base directories support
Compatible with most Vim plugins, including Ruby and Python plugins

See :help nvim-features for the full list, and :help news for noteworthy changes in the latest version!

Install from package

Pre-built packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux are found on the Releases page.

Managed packages are in Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, Void…

View on GitHub

SpaceVim is a Vim distribution with some default configuration for developers. It comes with an outline (press <F2>), a tree view (press <F3>), and many supported languages (golang, php, python, javascript, ...) for IDE features (completion, syntax highlighting, refactoring, code browsing, debugging, ...). The configuration is made easy with a simple TOML file. It's a good way to step into Vim for newbies.

🕺🏼 All together

Below is a tree-pane view with the following panes:

Vim in the main pane (golang SpaceVim layer, with Tagbar and Nerdtree plugins)
modd in the bottom-left pane to run my unit tests on modifications
a shell in the bottom-right pane to run git commands (git lg)

👾 List of awesome dev CLI tools

dockly: Docker UI in CLI
httpie: awesome CLI HTTP client
jq & fx: CLI JSON viewers
lnav: a log file navigator
glances: an eye on your system
bat: cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration
exa: the ultimate ls
tig: a powerful git wrapper for CLI users
newman: automate your Postman tests in CLI or CI/CD
icdiff: a user-friendly diff tool (to use with git)

Here it is!

I hope you found it useful.
Don't hesitate to suggest other tools in comments!
Don't hesitate to say if you're tired of seeing such "awesome" articles! ;)

What do you think of environmental impact of services like Netflix, Google, Amazon and what are your alternatives ?

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 11:34:52 +0000

DEV's community growth 🥳

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Tue, 28 May 2019 07:37:49 +0000

Hi guys! Our community has grown up from 119000 to 172600 users (+53600) in the last 6 months.

What do you think?

📛 🗣️ Which dev conferences did you attend?

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 22:33:20 +0000

Hi guys!

Did you ever attend any dev conference?

I've been developing for almost 20 years but I discovered dev conferences only in 2016. That year, I had the chance to attend the very famous devoxx conference in Paris. The tickets, the train and the hotel room were paid by my company.

It was very exciting! Meeting so many developers, hearing some famous speakers talking about hot topics, getting my first stickers... 😉

That was also after this event that I wrote my first blog post on the corporate social network. And that I started to blog.

I usually try to be very open-minded when I attend such events. I don't go to the talks about my favorite stack. I prefer attend talks about some exotic technology (blockchain, rust, ...) or hear feedbacks from people who experimented something new in production (CQRS, docker, microservices, ...). I also like talks about testing, devops and agility.

Now, let me introduce you to the events I had the chance to go.

BreizhCamp

🔗 www.breizhcamp.org
🐦 twitter.com/breizhcamp
📆 20-22 / 03 / 2019
🗺️ Rennes (🇫🇷)
💵 90€
👩‍💻 ~800 attendees

Codeurs en Seine

🔗 www.codeursenseine.com
🐦 twitter.com/codeursenseine
📆 21 / 11 / 2019
🗺️ Rouen (🇫🇷)
💵 Free
👩‍💻 ~900 attendees

Devoxx France

🔗 www.devoxx.fr
🐦 twitter.com/DevoxxFR
📆 17-19 / 04 / 2019
🗺️ Paris (🇫🇷)
💵 605€
👩‍💻 ~3000 attendees

And you, which conferences did you attend?

Building a Custom IDE with Tmux

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 22:27:52 +0000

Hi!

Today, I want to share about a tool I've been using for a few months and which helps me a lot in my day to day job: tmux.

As a software craftsman and CLI lover, I'm always looking for the best tools to be as productive as possible.

Let me show you how I use tmux as the foundation of what I call my custom IDE.

Why Tmux?

Tmux is a wonderful terminal multiplexer that comes with some plugins.

You might wonder why you would need to use such a thing. Many terminal emulators come with built-in feature for splitting your term.
In fact, it comes that tmux is much more powerful for splitting and resizing windows.
The other reason is that tmux can work with any term. So if you change your term, you don't need to reconfigure all your presets. Tmux does it for you.
And you can also use tmux without X, in a simple tty.

tmux / tmux

tmux source code

Welcome to tmux!

tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals to be created accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached.

This release runs on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, macOS and Solaris.

Dependencies

tmux depends on libevent 2.x, available from this page.

It also depends on ncurses, available from this page.

To build tmux, a C compiler (for example gcc or clang), make, pkg-config and a suitable yacc (yacc or bison) are needed.

Installation

Binary packages

Some platforms provide binary packages for tmux, although these are sometimes out of date. Examples are listed on this page.

From release tarball

To build and install tmux from a release tarball, use:

./configure && make
sudo make install

tmux can use the utempter library to update utmp(5), if it is…

View on GitHub

Install it

Install tmux through your favorite package manager, or compile it from the sources:

$ git clone https://github.com/tmux/tmux.git
$ cd tmux
$ sh autogen.sh
$ ./configure && make

Configure it

Tmux may look a bit raw and difficult to handle at the beginning. Fortunately, it comes with a great community that helps a lot to set it up. After trying many configurations, I've ended up with the one of gpakosz:

It comes with presets for bindings and a great powerline look for the status bar.

Just have a loot at the README to customize it to your needs!

Personally, I find it useless to have the uptime in my status bar, so I removed it from the configuration. I also added some plugins:

tmux-plugins/tpm The Tmux Plugin Manager
tmux-plugins/tmux-sensible Basic settings
tmux-plugins/tmux-yank Allows copying to system clipboard
tmux-plugins/tmux-open Key bindings for quick opening of a highlighted file or url
chriszarate/tmux-tasks Display the count of (urgent) tasks in the status bar. Requires taskwarrior.

Use it

You have to set tmux as your default shell in your preferred terminal emulator. Once done, tmux will be launched each time you open a new term.

Basically, when tmux starts, it creates an empty session with a single window containing a blank pane and a status bar. The status bar is divided in 3 parts: left, middle and right. If, like me, you choose to use the configuration above, the left part will display the session's name (or index if name is unset) and the uptime. The right part will display the battery, the date, the username and the hostname. In the middle, you'll see the windows' titles (or the name of the process running in the focused pane if the name is unset).

The basics are sessions, windows and panes. Each time you open a term (or a new tab in the term), tmux launches a new session. A new session contains a window. A new window contains a pane in your $HOME dir.

Bindings in tmux are essential: you can access them by using the prefix Ctrl-a or Ctrl-b.

Here are the main bindings I use:

<prefix> Ctrl-c creates a new session
<prefix> c creates a new window
<prefix> % splits the current pane vertically
<prefix> " splits the current pane horizontally

Now, if you feel uncomfortable with bindings, tmux has a great mouse mode, allowing you to select, switch and resize panes.

Get the most of it

The killer feature of tmux is the sessions. Imagine you want to build a window with 3 panes for editing a file, play with git and run your tests. Just create a new session, split the panes and adjust their size to your needs.

Great? Not that much.

As there is no built-in mechanism to save session, I use the tmuxp tool. This is a must-have session manager for tmux.

Install it through your distro's manager or:

$ pip install --user tmuxp

In two words: tmuxp allows you to easily create sessions from yaml/json files and to load 'em when you need it. And it's not only about creating the windows & panes layout: you can also run commands in each of the panes. So you can run vim in the main pane, cd to your project directory in another pane to play with git, and run a file-watcher in a 3rd pane to trigger your tests:

# my-project.yaml
session_name: my project
windows:
- window_name: my custom IDE
  layout: main-vertical
  shell_command_before:
    - pj my-project
  panes:
    - vim
    - git status
    - phpunit-watcher watch

Then just run tmuxp load -y my-project.yaml.

And if, like me, you need to build up a full environment to work on your app, know that there is no limit. The session I use for my current project has many windows:

1 IDE window: 3-panes with vim, a term to play with git and a term to run the tests,
9 windows, one for each log file I need to grep with jq or lnav,
a window to serve the assets of my front,
a window to run my stubs (typically a SpringBoot app).

That's it!

I hope you learned something by reading this article and that you'll have a look at tmux. I'm not an expert of it. I must say I don't use 10% of the features, but this tool has become an essential part of my dev env. I guess it could do the same for you.

Thanks for reading.

Bye.

My Go Toolkit to Build a Frameworkless App

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 15:26:49 +0000

A few months ago, I started my journey from PHP to Go on a new app in my company.

Some 3 months after, I posted another Article on DEV talking about my feedbacks on the language.

Now it's the time to share about the libraries & tools I've been using so far. Note that I don't use any framework nor any ORM. Just the right libraries to do the job.

Libraries

1. Viper

🌠 7,353

spf13 / viper

Go configuration with fangs

Viper v2 feedback

Viper is heading towards v2 and we would love to hear what you would like to see in it. Share your thoughts here: https://forms.gle/R6faU74qPRPAzchZ9

Thank you!

Go configuration with fangs!

Many Go projects are built using Viper including:

Install

go get github.com/spf13/viper

Note: Viper uses Go Modules to manage dependencies.

What is Viper?

Viper is a complete configuration solution for Go applications including 12-Factor apps. It is designed to work within an application, and can handle all types of configuration needs and formats. It supports:

setting defaults
reading from JSON, TOML, YAML, HCL, envfile and Java properties config files
live watching and re-reading of config files (optional)
reading from environment variables
reading from remote config systems (etcd or Consul), and watching changes
reading from command line flags
reading…

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2. Gin Gonic

🌠 23,913

gin-gonic / gin

Gin is a HTTP web framework written in Go (Golang). It features a Martini-like API with much better performance -- up to 40 times faster. If you need smashing performance, get yourself some Gin.

Gin Web Framework

Gin is a web framework written in Go. It features a martini-like API with performance that is up to 40 times faster thanks to httprouter If you need performance and good productivity, you will love Gin.

Gin's key features are:

Zero allocation router
Speed
Middleware support
Crash-free
JSON validation
Route grouping
Error management
Built-in rendering
Extensible

Getting started

Prerequisites

Gin requires Go version 1.21 or above.

Getting Gin

With Go's module support, go [build|run|test] automatically fetches the necessary dependencies when you add the import in your code:

import "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"

Alternatively, use go get:

go get -u github.com/gin-gonic/gin

Running Gin

A basic example:

package main
import (
  "net/http"

  "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
)

func main() {
  r := gin.Default()
  r.GET("/ping", func(c *gin.Context) {
    c.JSON(http.StatusOK,

…

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3. Mgo

🌠 1,385

globalsign / mgo

The MongoDB driver for Go

This fork has had a few improvements by ourselves as well as several PR's merged from the original mgo repo that are currently awaiting review Changes are mostly geared towards performance improvements and bug fixes, though a few new features have been added.

Further PR's (with tests) are welcome, but please maintain backwards compatibility.

Detailed documentation of the API is available at GoDoc.

A sub-package that implements the BSON specification is also included, and may be used independently of the driver.

Supported Versions

mgo is known to work well on (and has integration tests against) MongoDB v3.0, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6.

MongoDB 4.0 is currently experimental - we would happily accept PRs to help improve support!

Changes

Fixes attempting to authenticate before every query (details)
Removes bulk update / delete batch size limitations (details)
Adds native support for time.Duration marshalling…

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4. Zap

🌠 5,901

uber-go / zap

Blazing fast, structured, leveled logging in Go.

⚡ zap

Blazing fast, structured, leveled logging in Go.

Installation

go get -u go.uber.org/zap

Note that zap only supports the two most recent minor versions of Go.

Quick Start

In contexts where performance is nice, but not critical, use the SugaredLogger. It's 4-10x faster than other structured logging packages and includes both structured and printf-style APIs.

logger, _ := zap.NewProduction()
defer logger.Sync() // flushes buffer, if any
sugar := logger.Sugar()
sugar.Infow("failed to fetch URL",
  // Structured context as loosely typed key-value pairs.
  "url", url,
  "attempt", 3,
  "backoff", time.Second,
)
sugar.Infof("Failed to fetch URL: %s", url)

When performance and type safety are critical, use the Logger. It's even faster than the SugaredLogger and allocates far less, but it only…

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5. Go.uuid gofrs/uuid

🌠 394

gofrs / uuid

A UUID package for Go

UUID

Package uuid provides a pure Go implementation of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) variant as defined in RFC-9562. This package supports both the creation and parsing of UUIDs in different formats.

This package supports the following UUID versions:

Version 1, based on timestamp and MAC address
Version 3, based on MD5 hashing of a named value
Version 4, based on random numbers
Version 5, based on SHA-1 hashing of a named value
Version 6, a k-sortable id based on timestamp, and field-compatible with v1
Version 7, a k-sortable id based on timestamp

Project History

This project was originally forked from the github.com/satori/go.uuid repository after it appeared to be no longer maintained, while exhibiting critical flaws. We have decided to take over this project to ensure it receives regular maintenance for the benefit of the larger Go community.

We'd like to thank Maxim Bublis for his hard work on the…

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6. JWT-Go

🌠 4,849

dgrijalva / jwt-go

ARCHIVE - Golang implementation of JSON Web Tokens (JWT). This project is now maintained at:

THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTANED

The new repository can be found at: https://github.com/golang-jwt/jwt

For more information, see issue #462.

jwt-go

A go (or 'golang' for search engine friendliness) implementation of JSON Web Tokens

NEW VERSION COMING: There have been a lot of improvements suggested since the version 3.0.0 released in 2016. I'm working now on cutting two different releases: 3.2.0 will contain any non-breaking changes or enhancements. 4.0.0 will follow shortly which will include breaking changes. See the 4.0.0 milestone to get an idea of what's coming. If you have other ideas, or would like to participate in 4.0.0, now's the time. If you depend on this library and don't want to be interrupted, I recommend you use your dependency mangement tool to pin to version 3.

SECURITY NOTICE: Some older versions of Go have a security issue in the cryotp/elliptic. Recommendation is to upgrade to at least…

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7. Testify

🌠 6,634

stretchr / testify

A toolkit with common assertions and mocks that plays nicely with the standard library

Testify - Thou Shalt Write Tests

ℹ️ We are working on testify v2 and would love to hear what you'd like to see in it, have your say here: https://cutt.ly/testify

Go code (golang) set of packages that provide many tools for testifying that your code will behave as you intend.

Features include:

Get started:

Install testify with one line of code, or update it with another
For an introduction to writing test code in Go, see https://go.dev/doc/code#Testing
Check out the API Documentation https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/stretchr/testify
Use testifylint (via golanci-lint) to avoid common mistakes
A little about Test-Driven Development (TDD)

`assert` package

The assert package provides some helpful methods that allow you to write better test code in Go.

Prints friendly, easy to read failure descriptions
Allows for very readable code
Optionally annotate each assertion with a message

See it in action:

package

…

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8. Go-yaml

🌠 2,692

go-yaml / yaml

YAML support for the Go language.

YAML support for the Go language

Introduction

The yaml package enables Go programs to comfortably encode and decode YAML values. It was developed within Canonical as part of the juju project, and is based on a pure Go port of the well-known libyaml C library to parse and generate YAML data quickly and reliably.

Compatibility

The yaml package supports most of YAML 1.2, but preserves some behavior from 1.1 for backwards compatibility.

Specifically, as of v3 of the yaml package:

YAML 1.1 bools (yes/no, on/off) are supported as long as they are being decoded into a typed bool value. Otherwise they behave as a string. Booleans in YAML 1.2 are true/false only.
Octals encode and decode as 0777 per YAML 1.1, rather than 0o777 as specified in YAML 1.2, because most parsers still use the old format Octals in the 0o777 format are supported though, so new files…

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Tools

1. Gomock + mockgen

🌠 2,023

Gomock is a testing library that allows you to mock your dependencies and to make assertions on them. Mockgen is a CLI tool packaged with gomock to create your mocks.

golang / mock

GoMock is a mocking framework for the Go programming language.

gomock

Update, June 2023: This repo and tool are no longer maintained Please see go.uber.org/mock for a maintained fork instead.

gomock is a mocking framework for the Go programming language. It integrates well with Go's built-in testing package, but can be used in other contexts too.

Installation

Once you have installed Go, install the mockgen tool.

Note: If you have not done so already be sure to add $GOPATH/bin to your PATH.

To get the latest released version use:

Go version < 1.16

GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/golang/mock/mockgen@v1.6.0

Go 1.16+

go install github.com/golang/mock/mockgen@v1.6.0

If you use mockgen in your CI pipeline, it may be more appropriate to fixate on a specific mockgen version. You should try to keep the library in sync with the version of mockgen used to generate your mocks.

Running mockgen

mockgen has two modes of operation: source and reflect.

Source mode

Source…

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2. Modd

🌠 977

A file watcher allowing you to restart your app, to run your unit tests and much more

cortesi / modd

A flexible developer tool that runs processes and responds to filesystem changes

Modd is a developer tool that triggers commands and manages daemons in response to filesystem changes.

If you use modd, you should also look at devd, a compact HTTP daemon for developers Devd integrates with modd, allowing you to trigger in-browser livereload with modd.

The repo contains a set of example modd.conf files that you can look at for a quick idea of what modd can do:

Example	Description
frontend.conf	A front-end project with React + Browserify + Babel. Modd and devd replace many functions of Gulp/Grunt.
go.conf	Live unit tests for Go.
python.conf	Python + Redis, with devd managing livereload.

Install

Modd is a single binary with no external dependencies, released for OSX Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Go to the releases page, download the package for your OS, and copy the binary to somewhere on your PATH.

Alternatively, with Go 1.17+ installed, you can install…

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I hope that you'll find some of these libs/tools useful for your needs.

Don't hesitate to propose the ones you find great.

Thank you for reading!

My PHP Toolkit to Build a (quite) Frameworkless App

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 23:15:08 +0000

Hey, let me introduce you some of the libraries & tools I've been using in many PHP projects running in production.

I'm used to build my own framework by picking up libs in the below list each time I start a new PHP project. But to be honest, I must admit that I still use a micro-framework for basic HTTP stuff: Slim.

📝 I use no ORM and I mainly build backend apps with Web APIs.

Libraries

1. Slim Framework

🙋 Purpose: Micro-Framework intended to build Web APIs
🌠 GitHub stars: 9,475
🔗 URL: slimphp/slim

2. Slim Framework CSRF protection middleware

slimphp / Slim-Csrf

Slim Framework CSRF protection middleware

Slim Framework CSRF Protection

This repository contains a Slim Framework CSRF protection PSR-15 middleware. CSRF protection applies to all unsafe HTTP requests (POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH).

You can fetch the latest CSRF token's name and value from the Request object with its getAttribute() method. By default, the CSRF token's name is stored in the csrf_name attribute, and the CSRF token's value is stored in the csrf_value attribute.

Install

Via Composer

$ composer require slim/csrf

Requires Slim 4.0.0 or newer.

Usage

In most cases you want to register Slim\Csrf for all routes, however, as it is middleware, you can also register it for a subset of routes.

Register for all routes

use DI\Container
use Slim\Csrf\Guard;
use Slim\Factory\AppFactory;

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Start PHP session
session_start();

// Create Container
$container = new Container

…

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🙋 Purpose: Protect your GUI pages with a CSRF token
🌠 GitHub stars: 201
🔗 URL: slimphp/csrf

3. Slim Framework Flash Messages

slimphp / Slim-Flash

Slim Framework flash messages service provider

Slim Framework Flash Messages

This repository contains a Slim Framework Flash messages service provider. This enables you to define transient messages that persist only from the current request to the next request.

Install

Via Composer

$ composer require slim/flash

Requires Slim 3.0.0 or newer.

Usage

Slim 4

This example assumes that you have php-di/php-di installed.

<?php
use DI\ContainerBuilder;
use Slim\Factory\AppFactory;
use Slim\Flash\Messages;
use Slim\Routing\RouteContext;

require_once __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

$containerBuilder = new ContainerBuilder();

// Add container definition for the flash component
$containerBuilder->addDefinitions(
    [
        'flash' => function () {
            $storage = [];
            return new Messages($storage);
        }
    ]
);

AppFactory::setContainer($containerBuilder->build());

$app = AppFactory::create();

// Add session start

…

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🙋 Purpose: This enables you to define transient messages that persist only from the current request to the next request
🌠 GitHub stars: 104
🔗 URL: slimphp/flash

4. Twig

🙋 Purpose: A very popular template engine that integrates well with Slim (slimphp/twig-view)
🌠 GitHub stars: 5,705
🔗 URL: twigphp/twig

5. Monolog

Seldaek / monolog

Sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services

Monolog - Logging for PHP

Note This is the documentation for Monolog 3.x, if you are using older releases see the documentation for Monolog 2.x or Monolog 1.x

Monolog sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services. See the complete list of handlers below. Special handlers allow you to build advanced logging strategies.

This library implements the PSR-3 interface that you can type-hint against in your own libraries to keep a maximum of interoperability. You can also use it in your applications to make sure you can always use another compatible logger at a later time As of 1.11.0 Monolog public APIs will also accept PSR-3 log levels Internally Monolog still uses its own level scheme since it predates PSR-3.

^{Sponsored by:}

Better Stack lets you centralize, search, and visualize your logs.

Installation

Install the latest version with

composer require monolog/monolog

Basic Usage

<?php
use

…

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🙋 Purpose: Sends your logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services
🌠 GitHub stars: 13,388
🔗 URL: seldaek/monolog

6. Zend ACL permissions

zendframework / zend-permissions-acl

zend-permissions-acl

Repository abandoned 2019-12-31

This repository has moved to laminas/laminas-permissions-acl.

Provides a lightweight and flexible access control list (ACL) implementation for privileges management.

File issues at https://github.com/zendframework/zend-permissions-acl/issues
Documentation is at https://docs.zendframework.com/zend-permissions-acl/

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: Provides a lightweight and flexible access control list (ACL) implementation for privileges management
🌠 GitHub stars: 55
🔗 URL: zendframework/zend-permissions-acl

7. Guzzle

guzzle / guzzle

Guzzle, an extensible PHP HTTP client

Guzzle, PHP HTTP client

Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services.

Simple interface for building query strings, POST requests, streaming large uploads, streaming large downloads, using HTTP cookies, uploading JSON data etc...
Can send both synchronous and asynchronous requests using the same interface.
Uses PSR-7 interfaces for requests, responses, and streams. This allows you to utilize other PSR-7 compatible libraries with Guzzle.
Supports PSR-18 allowing interoperability between other PSR-18 HTTP Clients.
Abstracts away the underlying HTTP transport, allowing you to write environment and transport agnostic code; i.e., no hard dependency on cURL PHP streams, sockets, or non-blocking event loops.
Middleware system allows you to augment and compose client behavior.

$client = new \GuzzleHttp\Client()
$response = $client->request('GET', 'https://api.github.com/repos/guzzle/guzzle');

echo $

…

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services
🌠 GitHub stars: 15,355
🔗 URL: guzzlehttp/guzzle

8. PDO

🙋 Purpose: PHP extension to build and execute secured SQL prepared statements
🔗 URL: PDO

9. Zend XML-RPC

zendframework / zend-xmlrpc

XmlRpc component from Zend Framework

zend-xmlrpc

Repository abandoned 2019-12-31

This repository has moved to laminas/laminas-xmlrpc.

From its home page, XML-RPC is described as a ”...remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.”

Zend\XmlRpc provides support for both consuming remote XML-RPC services and building new XML-RPC servers.

File issues at https://github.com/zendframework/zend-xmlrpc/issues
Documentation is at https://docs.zendframework.com/zend-xmlrpc/

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: Provides support for both consuming remote XML-RPC services and building new XML-RPC servers
🌠 GitHub stars: 14
🔗 URL: zendframework/zend-xmlrpc

10. PHPMailer

PHPMailer / PHPMailer

The classic email sending library for PHP

PHPMailer – A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP

Features

Probably the world's most popular code for sending email from PHP!
Used by many open-source projects: WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla! and many more
Integrated SMTP support – send without a local mail server
Send emails with multiple To, CC, BCC, and Reply-to addresses
Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
Add attachments, including inline
Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, and XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SMTPS and SMTP+STARTTLS transports
Validates email addresses automatically
Protects against header injection attacks
Error messages in over 50 languages!
DKIM and S/MIME signing support
Compatible with PHP 5.5 and later, including PHP 8.2
Namespaced to prevent name clashes
Much more!

Why you might need it

Many PHP developers need to send email from their code. The only…

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP
🌠 GitHub stars: 12,422
🔗 URL: phpmailer/phpmailer

11. Firebase / PHP-JWT

firebase / php-jwt

PHP package for JWT

PHP-JWT

A simple library to encode and decode JSON Web Tokens (JWT) in PHP, conforming to RFC 7519.

Installation

Use composer to manage your dependencies and download PHP-JWT:

composer require firebase/php-jwt

Optionally, install the paragonie/sodium_compat package from composer if your php env does not have libsodium installed:

composer require paragonie/sodium_compat

Example

use Firebase\JWT\JWT
use Firebase\JWT\Key;

$key = 'example_key';
$payload = [
    'iss' => 'http://example.org',
    'aud' => 'http://example.com',
    'iat' => 1356999524,
    'nbf' => 1357000000
];

/**
 * IMPORTANT:
 * You must specify supported algorithms for your application. See
 * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-jose-json-web-algorithms-40
 * for a list of spec-compliant algorithms.
 */
$jwt = JWT::encode($payload, $key, 'HS256');
$decoded = JWT::

…

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🙋 Purpose: A simple library to encode and decode JSON Web Tokens (JWT) in PHP, conforming to RFC 7519
🌠 GitHub stars: 4,574
🔗 URL: firebase/php-jwt

12. Hassankhan / Config

hassankhan / config

Config is a lightweight configuration file loader that supports PHP, INI, XML, JSON, and YAML files

Config

Config is a file configuration loader that supports PHP, INI, XML, JSON YML, Properties and serialized files and strings.

Requirements

Config requires PHP 7.4+.

IMPORTANT: If you want to use YAML files or strings, require the Symfony Yaml component in your composer.json.

Installation

The supported way of installing Config is via Composer.

$ composer require hassankhan/config

Usage

Config is designed to be very simple and straightforward to use. All you can do with it is load, get, and set.

Loading files

The Config object can be created via the factory method load(), or by direct instantiation:

use Noodlehaus\Config
use Noodlehaus\Parser\Json;

// Load a single file
$conf = Config::load('config.json');
$conf = new Config('config.json');

// Load values from multiple files
$conf = new Config(['

…

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: Config is a lightweight configuration file loader that supports PHP, INI, XML, JSON, and YAML files
🌠 GitHub stars: 749
🔗 URL: hassankhan/config

Tools

As a PHP craftsman, the tools below are mandatory in my toolkit. Most of them (except shellcheck) are installable through composer, which allows you to add them as dev dependencies to your project's composer.json.

1. Composer

🙋 Purpose: Essential PHP dependency manager, and much more
🌠 GitHub stars: 18,049
🔗 URL: Composer

2. PHPUnit

🙋 Purpose: Awesome unit tests framework with mocking features
🌠 GitHub stars: 12,785
🔗 URL: PHPUnit

3. PHP Code Sniffer

squizlabs / PHP_CodeSniffer

PHP_CodeSniffer tokenizes PHP files and detects violations of a defined set of coding standards.

Warning

This repository has been abandoned. Its successor is PHPCSStandards/PHP_CodeSniffer

See issue #3932 for more information.

About

PHP_CodeSniffer is a set of two PHP scripts; the main phpcs script that tokenizes PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to detect violations of a defined coding standard, and a second phpcbf script to automatically correct coding standard violations. PHP_CodeSniffer is an essential development tool that ensures your code remains clean and consistent.

Requirements

PHP_CodeSniffer requires PHP version 5.4.0 or greater, although individual sniffs may have additional requirements such as external applications and scripts. See the Configuration Options manual page for a list of these requirements.

If you're using PHP_CodeSniffer as part of a team, or you're running it on a CI server, you may want to configure your project's settings using a configuration file.

Installation

The easiest way to get started with PHP_CodeSniffer is to download the Phar files for each of…

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🙋 Purpose: Static analysis tool to detect & fix coding standard violations
🌠 GitHub stars: 5,915
🔗 URL: squizlabs/php_codesniffer

4. PHP Mess Detector aka phpmd

🙋 Purpose: Static analysis tool to detect code smells, bad design, bugs, unused parameters, etc.
🌠 GitHub stars: 1,315
🔗 URL: phpmd/phpmd

5. PHP Coding Standard Fixer aka php-cs-fixer

🙋 Purpose: Automatically fixes coding standard violations
🌠 GitHub stars: 7,036
🔗 URL: friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer

6. SensioLabs Security Checker

🙋 Purpose: The SensioLabs Security Checker is a command line tool that checks if your application uses dependencies with known security vulnerabilities
🌠 GitHub stars: 1,397
🔗 URL: sensiolabs/security-checker

7. XML Linter

sclable / xml-lint

A php tool to lint and validate xml files from the commandline.

Sclable XML Lint

A php tool to lint and validate xml files from the commandline.

XML Lint checks the syntax of any xml files and validates the file against the XSD schema defined in the file.

Usage

Installation with Composer

If you'd like to include this library in your project with composer, simply run:

composer require "sclable/xml-lint"

Command Line Usage

To lint a single xml file:

vendor/bin/xmllint path/to/file.xml

To lint a directory and all its subdirectories:

vendor/bin/xmllint path/to/dir

Help

xmllint has built in cli help screen:

vendor/bin/xmllint --help

Options

-v be verbose, display the filename of the current file to lint
-r 0 don't search recursive (if the argument is a directory)
-e name exclude files or directories containing 'name'
-s skip the xsd validation

Development

Run tests

# check code style
php tools/php-cs-fixer/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix --dry-run -v

# run tests
php vendor/bin/phpunit
php vendor/bin/behat

Using docker:

# Example
docker

…

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: A PHP tool to lint and validate XML files from the command line
🌠 GitHub stars: 6
🔗 URL: sclable/xml-lint

8. YAML Linter

j13k / yaml-lint

A compact command line linting tool for validating YAML files.

yaml-lint

A compact command line linting tool for validating YAML files, using the parsing facility of the Symfony Yaml Component.

Usage

usage: yaml-lint [options] [input source]

  input source    Path to file(s), or "-" to read from standard input

  -q, --quiet     Restrict output to syntax errors
  -h, --help      Display this help
  -V, --version   Display application version

Install

Composer

To get started using yaml-lint in a project, install it with Composer:

composer require --dev j13k/yaml-lint

It can then be run from the project's vendor/bin directory.

To set up yaml-lint globally, install it in the Composer home directory:

composer global require j13k/yaml-lint

It can then be run from the bin directory of Composer home (typically ~/.composer/vendor/bin).

Binary

A binary edition , yaml-lint.phar, is available for download with each release. This embeds the latest stable version of the Symfony Yaml component that is current at the time of the release.

…

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🙋 Purpose: Compact command line utility for checking YAML file syntax
🌠 GitHub stars: 3
🔗 URL: j13k/yaml-lint

9. Dockerfile Linter

projectatomic / dockerfile_lint

dockerfile-lint

A rule based 'linter' for Dockerfiles. The linter rules can be used to check file syntax as well as arbitrary semantic and best practice attributes determined by the rule file writer The linter can also be used to check LABEL rules against docker images.

Quickstart

Change to directory where you have a Dockerfile
run

Atomic CLI

    atomic run projectatomic/dockerfile-lint

    atomic run projectatomic/dockerfile-lint image <imageid>

Docker CLI

    docker run -it --rm -v $PWD:/root/ \
           projectatomic/dockerfile-lint \
           dockerfile_lint [-f Dockerfile]

    docker run -it --rm -v $PWD:/root/  \
           -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
           projectatomic/dockerfile-lint \
           dockerfile_lint  image <imageid>

By default, the linter runs in strict mode (errors and/or warnings result in non-zero return code). Run the command with -p or --permissive to…

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🙋 Purpose: Rule based Dockerfile linter
🌠 GitHub stars: 259
🔗 URL: projectatomic/dockerfile_lint

10. Shellcheck

koalaman / shellcheck

ShellCheck, a static analysis tool for shell scripts

ShellCheck - A shell script static analysis tool

ShellCheck is a GPLv3 tool that gives warnings and suggestions for bash/sh shell scripts:

The goals of ShellCheck are

To point out and clarify typical beginner's syntax issues that cause a shell to give cryptic error messages.
To point out and clarify typical intermediate level semantic problems that cause a shell to behave strangely and counter-intuitively.
To point out subtle caveats, corner cases and pitfalls that may cause an advanced user's otherwise working script to fail under future circumstances.

See the gallery of bad code for examples of what ShellCheck can help you identify!

View on GitHub

🙋 Purpose: A static analysis tool for shell scripts
🌠 GitHub stars: 13,440
🔗 URL: koalaman/shellcheck

11. Swagger CLI

🙋 Purpose: Validate Swagger/OpenAPI files in JSON or YAML format
🌠 GitHub stars: 125
🔗 URL: APIDevTools/swagger-cli

All these tools can be run automatically:

in your IDE
in a git hook
in your CI/CD pipeline

If you want to go further, please have a look at one of my former articles:

🚥 How to Automate Code Quality Checks in your Workflow? ⚙

Boris Jamot ✊ / ・ Sep 10 '18

#git #automation #cleancode #bash

Thanks for reading.

See ya!

🐘 Unit Tests in PHP

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 21:51:57 +0000

Hi folks! I'm going to talk about the way I use to design my unit tests in PHP.

Disclaimer

Let's start with a (my?) definition of unit testing:

The goal of unit tests is to check the correct behavior of each of the public functions, be given a representative set of data.
The important thing is that external calls inside these functions must be tested in dedicated tests and therefore needs to be mocked.
The interest of having these tests is to run them each time you modify the codebase to verify that no regression was introduced.

As a pre-requisite, the code needs to be testing ready in the sense that we need that to allow mocking of the dependencies. In a given function, a dependency can be internal (e.g. another class of the project), or external (e.g. a call to 3rd-party library).

I won't be talking about the way of making the code testable. I know two techniques to achieve that using the dependency injection principle, but maybe there are other alternatives:

first, you can modify the interface of your function to pass all its dependencies as parameters (or using the constructor or setters),
or you can use a Dependency Injection Container (aka DIC) which is a common (anti?)pattern in software development (see PHP's PSR11 for further details).

Code architecture

When I start a new web project, I usually split my code in several distinct layers:

a router (usually Slim router), responsible for processing HTTP requests,
a controller layer, responsible for data validation and output rendering,
a business layer, responsible for the business logic,
a mapper layer (aka DTO),
a model layer (aka DAO).

Doing so makes the code more testable.

Some additional stuff may be required, depending on the needs, such as:

checkers, to validate inputs,
views, to render outputs,
middlewares, to add pre- and post-processing of HTTP requests,
routes, to manage the REST API's routes,
enablers, to manage outgoing requests to 3rd-party APIs (SMS, Email,...).

And finally, a bootstrap file to create all the things.

The classical workflow is:

a controller gets called on a given function,
it validates the input using a dedicated checker,
it calls the business layer with verified input,
- the business layer optionally uses a mapper to interact with the db
- it may also interact with a 3rd-party API through an enabler
- it optionally returns models to the controller layer
the controller renders the models returned by the business layer using a dedicated view.

When I write unit tests for a given layer, I only test the behavior of the layer's functions and I mock the calls to the functions of the sub-layers. For example, when I write a test for a controller, I mock the call to the business layer, to the checker and to the view. When I write a test for a business object, I mock the call to the mapper, to the enabler and to other business objects.

Example

Let's see what it looks like for a controller with a bit of code:

class UserController
{
    /** @var UserBusiness */
    public $business;
    /** @var UserChecker */
    public $checker;
    /** @var UserView */
    public $view;

    public function __construct(
        UserBusiness $business, 
        UserChecker $checker, 
        UserView $view
    ) {
        $this->business = $business;
        $this->checker = $checker;
        $this->view = $view;
    }

    public function getById(string $id): string
    {
        $this->checker->checkId($id);
        $user = $this->business->getById($id);

        return $this->view->render($user);
    }
}

Here you can see 3 dependencies in the getById function. I choose to pass these dependencies through the constructor of my UserController class. Alternatively, I could have used a Container passed to the function (or to the constructor), or I could have passed the deps through the function's parameters. The result would have been the same: I have to mock these 3 deps to test the function.

Using mocks

Thankfully, PHPUnit comes with a great API to work with mocks (see Test Doubles). I won't cover all the features here, but the documentation worth a look.

First, I need to mock the checkId function of the UserChecker. As you may guess, it raises an exception if the id is wrongly formatted.
Then, I mock the getById function of the UserBusiness.
And finally, the render function of the UserView.


class UserControllerTest extends PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase
{
    public function testGetById_Ok()
    {
        $business = $this->createMock(UserBusiness::class);
        $checker = $this->createMock(UserChecker::class);
        $view = $this->createMock(UserView::class);

        $expectedId = 'id';
        $expectedUser = new UserModel($expectedId, 'john', 'doe');
        $expectedResult = 'result';

        $checker->expects($this->once())
            ->method('checkId')
            ->with($expectedId);

        $business->expects($this->once())
            ->method('getById')
            ->with($expectedId)
            ->willReturn($expectedUser);

        $view->expects($this->once())
            ->method('render')
            ->with($expectedUser)
            ->willReturn($expectedResult);

        $controller = new UserController($business, $checker, $view);
        $actualResult = $controller->getById($expectedId);

        $this->assertEquals($expectedResult, $actualResult);
    }
}

The same has to be done for every layers.

Conclusion

Writing exhaustive unit tests can be painful as most of the time, you'll spent more time writing the test than writing the "real" code.
But IMO, there is no acceptable trade-off when it comes to testing your app.
I know that other testing techniques exists (like TDT), but I see them as complementary tests as they're closer to integration tests than to unit tests. But maybe I'm wrong?

Please feel free to give your opinion!

Thanks for reading!

It's Been Three Months Since My First Go LoC 🤓 🎓

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 23:13:49 +0000

It's been 3 months since I wrote my first Line of Code in Golang.

My Journey from PHP to Go

Boris Jamot ✊ / ・ Sep 20 '18

#php #go #feedback

I'm still excited about learning this new language but it seems I faced my first issues with Go. I'll talk about it later.

I introduced one of my previous post by saying that PHP was my main language and that I won't switch definitively to Go. Maybe this could change...

I really enjoy strong typing and compilation. I can have real-time feedback on my code without running it and without additional 3rd-party tools. The Go SDK is fully featured for linting, formatting, testing, compiling, running.

Reading from request's body

In my previous post, I was also saying that Go was a language for craftsmen. But this was far from the truth. I'll take an example: in Go, if you want to read the HTTP request's body in a middleware to analyze it for logging purpose, it becomes tricky:

func LoggingMiddleware(handler http.Handler) http.Handler {
    return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        // first, read the body and put it in a variable
        body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(r.Body)
        if err != nil {
            log.Printf("Error reading body: %v", err)
            http.Error(w, "can't read body", http.StatusBadRequest)
            return
        }

        log.Printf("incoming request's body: %s", body)

        // And now, re-assign the request's body with the original data
        r.Body = ioutil.NopCloser(bytes.NewBuffer(body))

        // finally, call next handler
        handler.ServeHTTP(mrw, r)
    })
}

As you may guess, reading the request's body makes it empty. That's why you have to re-assign it afterwards. That's because request's body is a kind of stream you can read byte after byte. It can be useful if you want to start the request's processing without having to read all the data. But in most cases, you don't need that.

(un)-marshalling

(un)marshalling is another thing that is not straightforward. What you need to know is that unmarshalling from JSON, BSON, YAML or whatever to a struct will almost never fail.

package main

import "encoding/json"
import "fmt"

type User struct {
    Name string `json:"name"`
    Age int `json:"age"`
}

func main() {
    var bob, alice User
    json.Unmarshal([]byte(`{"name":"bob","age":25}`), &bob)
    err := json.Unmarshal([]byte(`{"name":"alice","address":"NY"}`), &alice)

    fmt.Printf("err: %v\n", err)
    fmt.Printf("bob: %v\n", bob)
    fmt.Printf("alice: %v\n", alice)
}

Output:

err: <nil>
bob: {bob 25}
alice: {alice 0}

In this example, I omitted the age attribute in the JSON of Alice, but Go unmarshals it with no error. Confusing? That's because Go allocates default values for all missing attributes. In fact, you just have to provide valid JSON.

Note that supplementary JSON attributes are just ignored.

What really confused me was that I expected unmarshalling to fail with missing attributes. But if you want to check what you really got in the JSON, you can't trust the unmarshalling, you have to do it by yourself by checking all the fields of your struct manually. If one of the field has the default value for its type (e.g. 0 for integers, or empty string), then it could mean that it was missing from the JSON. But it could also mean that the client sent {"name":"alice","age":0}. Then, how to distinguish between missing attributes and attributes with default values? You could unmarshal to a map[string]interface{} and check manually that no key is missing, but it would be so WTF?!

If someone knows a better solution, don't hesitate!

Unit testing

Writing unit tests is the worst part of my developer journey in Golang. As an experimented OOP developer in PHP and Java, I used to write a lot of unit tests to have the best code coverage I can reach. In order to achieve it, I design my code with a high usage of dependency injection to allow me to replace dependencies by mocks in unit tests.

With Go, there is no equivalent of PHPUnit or JUnit that allows to quickly mock any dependency. Mocking in Go is based on interfaces. If you're using a struct as a dependency somewhere in your code, you have to write a custom interface for it. That's where Go lacks of consistency. Depending on the library you're using, if you're lucky, it will provide an interface and not a struct (that's the case for gin-gonic & uber-go/zap). But otherwise, you may encounter the mocking hell (that's the case with mgo mongo driver).

The drawback of writing interfaces for dependency injection is that you will lose the completion in your IDE. Let me explain it: when you write an interface for a 3rd-party library, you just put the functions you need in it. It means that if some day you want to use another function of that library, you don't even know what are the available functions. You can't hit ctrl+Space on the object to auto-complete because it will only display the functions of your custom interface, not the one of the original library object. So you have to browse the official doc on internet.

Knowing that, I would recommend to prefer "mocking-ready" libraries. It will save your time!

Mocking your dependencies

Depending on your testing strategy, you may have to mock some parts of your code, or some external library. As I said earlier, the first thing is to use interfaces instead of structs in your code, wether it be in the prototypes of your functions or in a Dependency Injection Container.

The principle is really simple: you just have to switch the real object with a struct implementing the interface you want to mock. You can do it manually, or you can do it with gomock if you want a fully featured mock, allowing you to count the number of calls, to check the types or even to capture the arguments. The only drawback of gomock is that you have to generate the mocks manually, and to update them each time you modify the interface. You also have to commit the mocks along with your "real" code.

My custom development environment

In my first post about Go, I was saying that I tried many IDE: Atom, Intellij Ultimate and Vim. After that, I also tried Visual Studio Code which was pretty nice, but none of them fully statisfied me. So, as many of my colleagues use Intellij, I gave it a new try and finally succeeded to make it work. I use it to write code, but also to debug and to browse the code.

Apart from Intellij, I also have a customized terminal with 3 panes using tmux. One of the panes is for playing with git or to type any other command. One is dedicated to vim. The last one is to run my app, check my conf and run the tests, all of this being possible with modd, a file watcher:

any modification of the codebase triggers a new run of my app (go run ./...),
any modification of a test file triggers the tests (go test ./...)
any modification of my conf files triggers a new check using pykwalify which is a JSON/YAML validator. The 3rd pane is a Vim allowing me to quickly edit files.

Conclusion

What I miss the most as a PHP developer is the community and the online resources. It seems like the official Go doc (which is great) is quite the only available resource, except posts on StackOverflow.
What is also confusing is that if you google something like "go + stuff", you won't get many results. You'll have more luck with "golang + stuff".

Anyway, these obstacles didn't hindered my motivation and my enthusiasm. I love the simplicity of the language.

I'll keep you informed of my progress in a future post.

Thanks for reading!

🌍 Where Are DEV Users Coming From?

Boris Jamot ✊ / — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 23:30:47 +0000

As you may already know, dev.to has an API to fetch articles and users.

Let's give it a try with my favorite HTTP client, httpie:

http https://dev.to/api/users/1

{
    "github_username": "benhalpern",
    "id": 1,
    "joined_at": "Dec 27, 2015",
    "location": "Brooklyn, NY",
    "name": "Ben Halpern",
    "profile_image": "https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--DOU9qJSH--/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,h_320,q_auto,w_320/https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/user/profile_image/1/f451a206-11c8-4e3d-8936-143d0a7e65bb.png",
    "summary": "A Canadian software developer who thinks he’s funny.",
    "twitter_username": "bendhalpern",
    "type_of": "user",
    "username": "ben",
    "website_url": "http://benhalpern.com"
}

What I first noticed is that id seems to be auto-incremented.
After some tries, I quickly found out the total number of users on dev.to: around 119000.
It gives me the idea to scrape all the users public data and try to play with it.

Let's try with this command:

for i in {1..119000}; do http https://dev.to/api/users/$i >> users.dev.to.json && echo "," >> users.dev.to.json && echo "https://dev.to/api/users/$i"; done

After a few hours running in the background, I finally got all the users in my JSON file.

I ended up by importing the JSON file in a mongodb collection using NoSQLBooster.

There isn't many information in the users' profile, but two of them worth having a look at them: joined_at and location. It could be very interesting to have a diagram showing the progression of registrations through time. Maybe I'll do it some day, but for now, let's compute some statistics on users' location.

I used two queries to compute the statistics. This one helped me to get the big trends in people's location:

db.getCollection("users.dev.to").aggregate(
    {"$group": {_id: "$location", count:{$sum:1}}}
).sort("-count")

Then, I use another query to get the count of people per location:

db.getCollection("users.dev.to").find({"location": /\bdublin\b/i})

The conclusions are the following:

Most of the users (90%) don't fill their location.
16.3% of the users who filled their location are from USA.
5.8% are from India.
4.9% are from UK.
4% are from Japan.
3.8% are from Germany.

Let's have a look at the full statistics below:

#	country	region or city	#region or city	#country	%
1	USA			1850	16.32%
		Incl New York	205
		Incl CA	194
		Incl NY	147
		Incl San Francisco	137
		Incl TX	119
		Incl Seattle	117
		Incl Los Angeles	107
		Incl Chicago	101
		Incl Washington	81
		Incl FL	78
		Incl PA	68
		Incl MA	67
		Incl AZ	38
		Incl MI	34
		Incl OH	30
2	India			660	5.82%
		Incl Bangalore	107
		Incl Delhi	103
3	UK			551	4.86%
		Incl London	258
		Incl England	35
		Incl Scotland	33
		Incl Wales	7
4	Japan			451	3.98%
		Incl Tokyo	242
5	Germany			428	3.77%
		Incl Berlin	128
6	Brazil			301	2.65%
7	France			294	2.59%
		Incl Paris	98
8	Canada			257	2.27%
		Incl Toronto	107
9	Nigeria			187	1.65%
		Incl Lagos	97
10	Netherlands			154	1.36%
		Incl Amsterdam	62
11	Spain			110	0.97%
12	Argentina			109	0.96%
13	Italy			102	0.90%
14	Indonesia			92	0.81%
15	Russia			89	0.78%
16	Mexico			86	0.76%
17	Philippines			85	0.75%
18	Poland			81	0.71%
19	Ukraine			75	0.66%
20	Portugal			63	0.56%
21	South Africa			57	0.50%
22	Pakistan			56	0.49%
23	Turkey			55	0.49%
24	Belgium			53	0.47%
25	Egypt			52	0.46%
26	Bangladesh			50	0.44%
27	Colombia			46	0.41%
28	Romania			45	0.40%
29	Kenya			45	0.40%
30	Switzerland			45	0.40%
31	Austria			43	0.38%
32	China			40	0.35%
33	Norway			38	0.34%
34	Ireland			33	0.29%
	Total main locations (listed above)			6683	58.94%
	Other locations (unlisted)			4656	41.06%
	Total locations			11339	100.00%
	`<null>`			90260	80.80%
	`<empty>`			10108	9.05%
	Total			111707	100%

Note: these numbers are one month old, but they give a good overview of the trends.

Thanks for reading!